Succession's Marital Freakshow

The Circles of Tom and Shiv's Nuptial Inferno

SPOILER ALERT!

A friend of mine who happens to be a marriage and sex therapist says she occasionally fantasizes about taking a hatchet to her own longtime husband’s head. “Marriage is terrible, it’s terribly hard,” says the expert, who should know.

I have not had hatchet fantasies about my husband of 24 years. We have never even played anything like “bitey” — one of the kinks that engage Shiv and Tom. We watched all four seasons of Succession on, mostly, winter nights cuddled up on a couch in our empty nest of an upstate New York house. From the same spot, during these past years, we also savored the soul-satisfying spectacle of white, entitled ultra-rich folks revealing lizard-people loathsomeness in White Lotus and Triangle of Sadness.

In the future, all these shows will surely be studied as the great cultural remnants of our climate-ruining, plastics-proliferating, animal-extincting, Trump-producing, Musky, billionaire-AI-controlled, obscenely wealth-hoarded era, and the abject helplessness of the common man and woman to do a goddamn thing about it.

Exactly like audiences for the ancient Greek comic poets and later satirists, but with better plumbing, anesthesia, and more stringent bathing habits, we can only laugh at our overlords from afar.

Last night’s Succession denouement, though, made me think again about the show’s ultimate point. Could it be that Succession was not really, or only, about Murdochian, worldly power. Doesn’t the ending suggest that its real aim is more timeless, about marriage and power and the legal cage in which the war of the sexes plays out, the happy domain where the political is always personal?

Last night’s penultimate scene: a close-up of the hands of frenemy married couple Tom and Shiv, in the back of a limo, warily coming together like bandaged bloody mixed martial arts contestants in the cage.

Logan Roy’s Royal Shakespearean orations always chewed up the screen. Kendall and Roman gave us psych 101 on the twisted souls molded by loveless childhoods with narcissistic mommies and daddies.

But in the end, the all-American monster marriage of Shiv and Tom (played by an Australian and a Brit) turns out to be the twisted spine of the series.

We could not look away from them because they figure in the most genuinely soul-piercing scenes in the series.

Throughout the series, the scenes between Tom and Shiv were always disturbing, but also, on some level, relatable. I froze throughout their first breakup scene, on the bed earlier in the season. “We gave it a go,” Tom says.

No, on my wedding might, I did not reveal that I had a loose idea of monogamy, as Shiv does to her supremely outgunned, kink-wise, husband. I didn’t even think it. But after 24 years of marriage, I’ve come to understand that fundamental to happy and lasting is knowing what to leave unsaid.

Most of us who remain married have had the very good luck or emotional intelligence (I confess to the former not the latter) to hook up with people whose psychological tics and dark sides don’t engage our buttons. Still, sometimes it is a struggle to keep fear, insecurity, pride and lust in check.

The proverbial hatchet.

All marriages involve a balance of power. You do this, I do that. I did more of that, you didn’t do enough of this, and so on and so on. We squabble about daily challenges, laundry, sick kids, money, who cooked last. The writers of Succession’s central marriage story use this couple as Dante’s Virgil, leading us down, down, down into the terrifying circles of nuptial inferno, forcing us to face the primal balancing act that drives everything. In the Tom and Shiv marriage, love versus hate, Eros or Thanatos, sex and death, power versus submission, is all darkness visible, explicit.

Throughout the series, Shiv’s cruelty to her Midwestern tool, with his scarred, quivering lip and puppy-eyes, made us laugh and cringe at the same time.“Uh … Oh, hello? Is this the replicant department? Yeah, my meat puppet has stopped working.”

Violence always lurks, swinging between kink and murderous. They bite each other in competitions to see who can stand the most pain. In season three, Shiv, who may or may not have given her hubby a black eye during rough sex, tells Tom that saying she doesn’t love him is just foreplay: “Just being horrible for fun.” This season, Tom slaps his wife’s ear during a fight. “Your earlobes are thick and chewy. They’re like barnacle meat.”

Then they get back together. Tom gives Shiv a gift, a black scorpion in glass, paperweight. “It’s funny,” he says plaintively, as she eyes it. Later they sext. “It was like the orgasm Olympics,” Tom texts. “Sorry if I broke your dick,” Shiv replies.

Essays have already been written about whether the the couple’s marriage would survive their election eve party balcony fight halfway through the last season. Wall Street Journal reported that even the cast discussed that question after filming the scene.

It plays out like this: Shiv’s been going around the party telling people Gojo will fire Tom after the Wayster company’s final sale to Swedish company run by Axander Skarsgard’s Lucas Mattson. When Tom confronts her, she doesn’t deny but says “uh, but it was kind of a tactical joke.”This sparks one of the all-time greatest insult exchanges in the history of movie marital spats. Guests are spectators through glass, and all of Manhattan twinkled below.

Tom: “You are a tough fuckin’ bitch .. you will always survive.”

Shiv: “You sure you’re not projecting? That is actually you?”

Tom: “Should we have a real conversation?”

Shiv: “With a scorpion .. I’m a scorpion. You’re a hyena . a fucking street rat .. no you’re a snake.

Tom: “I wonder if we shouldn’t clear the air. I think you can be a very selfish person .. you shouldn’t have even married me ..’

Shiv: “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings [by saying no]. You are fucking me for my DNA . for a fucking ladder … because your whole fucking family is parochial,”

She concludes by calling him “a hick, striving and parochial … servile.”

And finally, Tony replies: “I think you are incapable of love. And I think you are maybe not a good person to have children with.”

Last but not least, there’s the kid. Shiv is pregnant. Viewers know this way before her husband or family. We wondered if it was going to be a dropped plot twist, as she continues to sip champagne and the occasional Scotch.

When she finally shares the happy news with Tom, he grimaces and replies “is this a tactic?”

Shiv’s drinking set off the hyper parenting concern trolls. Vanity Fair even talked to four parenting experts, who all expressed alarm at the troubled creature such a damaged pair would spawn.

We will never know how bébé Wambsgans/Roy turns out, or what the most disturbing final scene of a hand since Carrie, means for Shiv and Tom. But, for me anyway, the voyage into Successions marital hell and back out was oddly rejuvenating. And cathartic. This morning, I appreciate my husband - whose birthday happens to be today - more than ever.

Related links:

VF parenting hand-wringer about Shiv story

Forbes financial expert on Tom and Shiv’s rich people divorce lessons

Wall Street Journal on the balcony fight